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What Should Be Done With America’s Slave Mansions?

A case for reimagining plantations—the engines of centuries of oppression—as laboratories for economic justice.

Parlange, a plantation Louisiana that was sustained by the labor of enslaved people, continues to be owned and operated by the descendants of the original enslavers.

Looking at plantations, one sees all the ways that plunder outlives the plundered. Like oil rigs pumping fortunes from buried fossils, America’s slave houses ceaselessly pump profits from their buried slaves. They frack our ancestors’ memories to fuel a booming southern tourism industry, turning forced labor camps into luxury inns and idyllic wedding venues. They trivialize our trauma.

This is why Blacks tend to avoid antebellum sites. Why, whenever the “Big Houses” fall into ruin, we are filled with glee. When, during the Civil War, Robert E. Lee’s plantation was destroyed, Frederick Douglass called it “a righteous retribution.” When, just last year, a fire engulfed Louisiana’s Nottoway Plantation, a grueling forced labor camp where the enslaved once chopped and stripped sugar cane, Blacks again thought it a righteous retribution.

And yet, despite over a century of relishing in their destruction, what many Black folks always truly wanted was the plantation’s reclamation—their redemption. When, in 1863, Douglass walked across the smoldering grounds of Lee’s Arlington Heights, what he found more moving than the demolition was the retrofitting of the master’s smokehouse into a schoolhouse.

“I wish you could see this school,” Douglass wrote to a fellow abolitionist. “When I was there there were a hundred children in it, the descendants of slaves, who held for many generations, going back more than two hundred years. The sight of these poor little children brought tears of joy, sadness, hope, and fear, and I know not what else. Three years ago to have taught these children in Virginia would have subjected the teacher to a heavy fine and to imprisonment. Now teachers and pupils are alike safe.”

Douglass’s panoramic prose conjures scenes of children writing, teachers lecturing, and classrooms swelling into soaring melodies. “The teachers (Mr. and Mrs. Simmons) kindly asked me to address the children,” Douglass recalled. “I complied, and sang two or three hymns with them.”

Witnessing jubilee through Douglass’s eyes, one sees a stirring vision of a plantation transformed from a devastating prison into a palace for deliverance. One sees a past vision of what the future could be.

Founded two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States still fumbles over what to do with the plantations that financed the country’s foundation—some 375 of which still remain, according to the Equal Justice initiative. It is, perhaps, the ultimate irony of the American project that our mission of freedom was not merely born alongside oppression but enabled by it. Look at the front of a nickel, and you will see Thomas Jefferson, the politician who wrote “all men are created equal.” Turn it over, and you will see Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello, where he whipped and raped slaves. It is the project of the Black Freedom Struggle to reconcile both sides of this coin,........

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